"A woman's work is never done".
(An old proverb)
"Woman's work" by Julia Alvarez opens the subject of the domestic role of women in family life. The author tells the story of her mother’s obsessive housekeeping that influenced the speaker’s future life. Julia Alvarez (or the speaker) depicts and criticizes her mother’s active domestic role but admits it has influenced her becoming a “woman working at home” herself.
The daughter, the protagonist and the speaker of the poem, starts with a rhetoric question: “Who says a woman's work isn't high art?” This was probably one of her mother’s favorite phrases while the latter performed her domestic chores:
Who says a woman's work isn't high art?
She'd challenge as she scrubbed the bathroom tiles.
Keep house as if the address were your heart.
The last line of the first stanza addresses the speaker’s father or talks about the whole family, whose hearts embody the address of the house her mother cared for so much (emphasizing that the mother’s care and love was embodied in the housekeeping chores).
